How it’s going: Hahaha. Revised an old YA novel, built the revision pathway, identified major themes to flesh out. Started a new middle grade novel. Am running into the 300 sonnets issue. I can admit this like a grown up.
Count: 1,156/80,000
Check List:
Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o
I wrote eighteen drafts of my first, real, live, going to finish this sucker if it kills me, novel without ever knowing what my protagonist should look like.
Eventually, I chickened out and drafts nineteen and twenty starred a generic white dude. Except that I didn’t know any. My dad is the closest white person I know well. He’s Cajun and Irish in that grandma immigrated from Ireland as a little girl, and I was called pistach by beloved old people until my twenties*. That upbringing, as a son of a first-generation immigrant and a lower class man who built his own tree cutting business by the skin of his teeth, shaped the man I love and fought with and fought for as an angry teenager.
None of that appeared in my story, because my main character existed no further than the period at the end of the sentence on the page.
Eventually I asked myself about me.
My dad was a big contributor to my upbringing, but so was my mom. She had an immensely different upbringing than I did, as a first generation immigrant from Japan who spent the rest of her formative years in the mining country of northern California.
I didn’t know the words for myself until later in life (hapa, nissei, mixed). It wasn’t until I left the cocoon of home that I understood how alone I was in the world. I had never, at that time, seen myself in a book as a main character.
So I made my protagonist hapa.
Suddenly he gained a history, and I became fascinated by the histories of the people around him. Everyone came to the same small town for a deviously similar reason, many of them from other countries and realms. The how and why of his problem solving motive took notes from my grandmother’s Methodist faith. His parents came into focus. His mother took center stage as a reformed villain, his father turned into a foil for the secondary antagonist. They lived, they breathed. And I got closer to an actual novel.
When I was fourteen, I knew everything. And I was insufferable.
I can admit that now.
When I was fourteen, I attended a summer school for the performing arts*, creative writing unit, and accidentally lucked into the best room in the whole dorm. For six weeks, high schoolers from twelve to eighteen (I’m assuming) were trapped together with assigned strangers, to absorb as much art as our long-suffering teachers could shout at us. But like, in a quiet and artsy manner.
The roommate became a lifelong friend and we visited each other in high school, though she lived just north of LA and I lived in a tiny, tucked away desert town. One visit, I saw a how-to writing book on her bookshelf. I asked her about it. But I asked as a sixteen year old, two years into knowing everything, asks about things. I asked, What are you doing with that?
She said, it’s interesting and I like it.
Don’t we already know how to write? I asked, forgetting that we had spent six weeks learning how to write from Actual People. And how did she know she had a good book?
She said, Just pick someone you don’t disagree with.
It was still years before I picked up a how-to writing book. To find a guru, I had to put aside my pre-conceived notions of what I expected to receive. I needed to accept what I accept from any book: a new thought. I also needed to pick something that fit my mind space at the time. So the first how-to writing book I bought was Peter David’s Writing for Comics.
I was already a comic book fan, I loved Q and Star Trek, and I had no idea how to write a comic book and thought that might be fun to try. It’s a great form to study voice and dialogue, while learning to trust someone who is not you to realize the idea you believe you have put on the page. I held on to that guru for as long as I needed him. Then I got the next book.
My favorite writing book is The Portable Poetry Workshop. You’ll notice I don’t write poetry, but the exercises can be applied to prose and never fail. I’ve gained an appreciation for books on theory, personal essays, lists of rules that can be flexed and twisted and happily ignored as needed. In all these, I have developed judgment to determine what will work for me and what won’t. And to know that someday, that judgment will change, and what did not work then, will work now.
Through it all, I kept writing.
*California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA). Home to artists, quirks, and ants. Oh, the ants.
Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing took me on a deep dive of the theory behind the parts of the play. Before this book, I had not considered that the pieces of the play could be treated philosophically. Egri discusses the protagonists and antagonists, setting the scene and establishing normal before diving into deviations from early Greek plays up to the 1920’s or so.
One of the topics he hit that was a great lightbulb moment for me was proving the premise. The premise is set in the first scene or at least in the introduction of each character. A story always begins with normal and then asks “what if?” In the first scene, we get the premise of the play to understand the normal. This should set the base of each character. Further scenes introduce the what if, the encroachment of the strange into the normal, so that the characters themselves deal or fail to deal with the new normal. Then they bounce off of each other in completely logical (for them) manners, thus creating conflict.
The climax is not the crux of the play.
Just a reminder, in a typical 5 act play, we have some phrases like introduction, action, rising action, climax, denouement, and so forth. In our modern attention spans, the climax is the crux of the conflict. It’s the boss battle that determines the ultimate winner. If you’ve read my other pieces on conversation, the climax is where you expect the winning argument to prevail.
The most important scene (according to Egri) happens just before the climax. It’s the scene where the characters, true to their character, embark on the final, most logical chain of actions that will lead them to a terrible confrontation with the other characters and thus end the play. In order to prove the premise, you must have set the premise in the beginning.
Proving the premise determines the climax with inevitability. There is no other path. In a way, proving the premise as its own scene just prior to the climax is the climax of the emotional journey. To be really fair, if a character makes a different choice in this scene, it can determine a happy ending or a sad one. Even if the path of the careening plot appeared to be going in a different direction just before the final decision.
I’m great at hedging my bets. But if I want to make a single statement in a work of art, I must stand firm from the very first sentence.
To be a good writer, you must read widely.
I don’t have to put that in quotation marks because every writing mentor, English teacher, writing friend, and writing book has told me the same thing. Substitute ‘more’ for widely, or ‘lots’. More than that. Even more. Read everything.
Read books. Read magazines. Read old letters. Read tweets and sub-tweets and screenshots sharing specific paired tweets. Read the hashtags, read the comments. Read parks. Read museum exhibits. Read cooking stores and clothing stores and high-end fashion, and don’t forget department stores. Read clever ice cream stores with branded cookbooks and a subscription service for ice cream pints.
My favorite thing to read is museum exhibits. One of the best I have seen was a show by Howardena Pindell during the 2018 spring season at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL*. It wasn’t just art that made the show memorable. The exhibit began with Pindell’s early media of choice, notably her work with paper dots and numerical patterns set in 3-D works. It moved to her exploration of themes and other media until the last room married theme and medium, so that her numerical patterns became an exploration of social justice. To one side of the dramatic works, there was an early work again, a piece consisting of an acrylic box filled with paper dots. Walking through the exhibit, we witnessed how the artist changed from a young artist experimenting with novel media to a mature artist exploring interconnecting themes. As viewers, we were changed by the exploration of the marriage of media and theme, and I walked away with a better understanding of how media can enhance thematic expression and exploration.
It was a good book.
The whole time I was reading the exhibit, I was only ever aware that Pindell had created thought-provoking art. Yet, there were times I got the sense that she had struggled, or triumphed, or regretted.
Each piece in the exhibit, in most exhibits, has a little explanatory card which can say something about the media used in creation, the title, the number sequence of the piece. A really good little explanatory card will use the available space to tell me what I need to know, but leave enough space for me to work out my own interaction with the piece.
In bad experiences, the little card has told me not what I am seeing, but what to see, what to think, how to feel about it.
The more places and things I read and read about and read to compare to other places and things I have read, the more I understand how to leave space for the reader. It’s a work in progress, but I’m getting there.
* “What Remains To Be Seen”, April-May 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
There’s a scene in Black Panther that made me laugh at the layers upon layers of conversation. Winston Duke, who should be in more things, plays M’Baku (this is not a spoiler. Everyone and their grandmother has seen this flick), a leader of the Jabari tribe and antagonist of the main character. He rules his people with care and sees a risk in the prince becoming king – you saw the movie. You know what happens next.
Duke creates a multi-layered character that says as much about his character’s role in the film as it does about his society – which we don’t see a lot of, actually. We get T’Challa and some little bits of the richly complex world of Wakanda, but we’re there for two hours of action and tragedy and triumph. In one scene, Martin Freeman as generic white guy, Everett Ross, keeps talking. Tale as old as time. But he stands before the leader of an entire tribe and interrupts much higher ranking women who already have leave to speak based on the societal hierarchy. That, and, he’s a guest. My man. Rude.
In an interview*, Duke said he invented the barking sound (also called a grunting sound) to make the point that Freeman’s character had no power in the throne room. He had no power in Wakanda. Had anyone else played Ross, like your basic Tom Cruise, or maybe a dozen interchangeable American white guys, it would still be a funny scene. But pick a white guy from a country with royalty and a famously complex cultural level of understanding of acceptable behavior, and it’s hilarious.
Just a shout out to world building: Pretend your character comes from a country with strict class delineations. Now pretend your character is running away with a character from a higher class. Do they speak like a peer? What rules will you have to break to make that okay?
*Empire Film Podcast #356, referenced by Webbed Media posted on March 26, 2019, “Winston Duke Improvised M’Baku Barking In Black Panther”.
Hear me out.
I played flute in high school, in the marching band, and was soundly terrible. That isn’t the point. The point is, the one oeuvre of music I took away was the underlying structure of the Sousa march.
Every American has heard a Sousa march, and I would wager, many non-Americans have heard them, too. John Philip Sousa was an American born composer, with a German mother, who created many iconic songs that are still blasted by the barely musical and actually musical alike. Why? Because they’re fun. They have the oom-PAH feel and the typical rising action to blaring climax journey, the scattered woodwinds and the screaming brass. Every. Single. Time.
The secret to surviving the flute contribution of the Sousa march is to play the exact same part on repeat, on full blast – no matter what the rest of the band is doing. The first time, the brass establishes the main tune. You play your piece. No one can hear you. The second time, the brass plays a dissolution which feels exactly like it sounds. It’s as though the sound is unwinding itself and falling apart. In the dogfight, you (the flute) play your part. No one can hear you except for the high notes, so that you poke off the rose stem as a series of aural thorns. The third time, the brass joins in with a rising threat of imminent blare and then it’s blastoff! No one can hear you. Play your heart out, anyway.
In written form, try including the counter theme a few times. The first time, maybe it’s a conversation. Or an authority figure no one likes. The second time, maybe it’s the muddy middle with a contained sub-plot (secondary story with the exact same characters) that play out something you wanted to say about the main plot or want the reader to know about the main plot before you make your big point. The third time, maybe no one can see it. Maybe not even you. It’ll still be there.
How it’s going: It still isn’t. I have revised a short work, written a picture book, and revised an essay. I even broke out a novel I wrote 4 years ago and fully developed the revision scope. Basically, I’m doing everything but the work I solemnly swore I would do for the 100 day project. I have cleaned my oven.
The point of the 100 day project is to practice a skill for 100 days while working toward a larger project. I have to say that I have written more in this one month than the previous 6 months. I have created as many new works in 4 weeks than all of last year. I have begun sending works out again. I’m killing it, so long as it is not the project I said I would actually do.
Count: 1,156/80,000
Check List:
Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o
In Draft No. 4 by John McPhee, he mentions the process of greening. Greening is what other writers would probably call trimming, or reduction, or editing; the process of reducing a manuscript by a certain number of words. Nearly everyone has done this exercise, whether a paid-for product or just a graded project. Nearly every writing seminar I’ve attended has mentioned some version of reducing your cast list. But that’s not always what my writing really needs.
In an embarrassing number of drafts, my villain was the same. And the antagonist was the same. I had one of each and the story went through a requisite number of hoops before strolling across the finish line.
Remember being fifteen? I bet you can think of one person in every facet of your life who you just couldn’t stand. Band, science class, Girl Scouts, the after school job, the weekend job, your extended family, that person you were brutally forced to share a bathroom with – that’s a lot of antagonists. One or two of them were probably villains.
In moving from point to point in my story, my protagonist needed a motivator to either get away from the current conflict or move toward a new conflict. Eventually, I adjusted my cast list. I added two new villains to create a two-pronged headache for the protagonist with two plot goals instead of one. I allowed two other characters to evolve in their positions to become antagonists. I also took the reins off the supporting characters. With hidden motivations and secret histories that have existed long before teenage protagonists, supporting characters became antagonists to each other and accidental supporters of the protagonist, until my casual straight line narrative turned into something of a chaotic grudge match.
Which was an issue for the next draft.
I learned this opener and closer trick from Linda Sue Park, at a conference many years ago. Not that many years, but more than I would like to count.
The first and last sentence of your story make the first and last impression on your reader for the time that they inhabit your story world. The reader opens the book and takes the first breath of your story, and is enraptured all the way to the last sentence, when they exhale for the final time before closing the book and saying goodbye to your characters and their journey.
When you have finished your work, there’s a good chance you know what your last sentence needs to be. Or maybe your first sentence is perfect and you’ve kept writing two pages beyond where you should have stopped because you can’t find the ‘just right’ words. Consider that you already have the inspiration you need to create this purposeful art. The opener introduces the reader to the initial character perspective, the closer demonstrates the new, hard-won perspective. Take a look at Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for an opener/closer duo.
Alternatively, if you have a great opener and closer, check that your character journey has come full circle from a normal world to a new normal post-story turmoil. For a movie version, take a look at Finding Nemo (post-prologue), where Nemo’s father is first terrified to allow his son out of the home, to the much more relaxed closing scene.